Original article: La Vanguardia: Irán, una revolución cultural y en femenino
Translation:
Iran, a Cultural Revolution Led by Women
Talent and Cunning Against Oppression
Lara Gómez Ruiz
Barcelona
01/18/2026 06:00 | Updated 01/18/2026 17:47
It has been three months since the writer Mahsa Mohebali fled Iran. “I lived there most of my life, but I lacked freedom of expression,” she confesses by email. Although she now resides in Catalonia and an in-person meeting could be arranged, she prefers to measure her words with the calm that written language guarantees her.
All the participants in this report have chosen this option. Some have even asked to appear only under their first names because, although they are outside the country, they fear reprisals against their relatives for speaking publicly against the regime of the ayatollahs in the Islamic Republic.
“You can see the layers of society between the lines of books; that’s why they fear us,” says Mohebali.
Mohebali does not mind giving her full name, but precisely for that reason she chooses prudence, recalling that “after the massacres of the 1980s, the government’s first organized killing campaign was the targeted assassination of writers and intellectuals,” and she suspects the same could happen again. She herself could be a target, as the government banned four of her books. That did not discourage her from continuing to write and publishing a fifth abroad. “You can see the layers of society between the lines of books written in this period. That’s why the regime imposes such severe censorship on literature and art. They fear us.”
Her husband, journalist, playwright, and actor Hossein Zoghi, agrees. In fact, he shares with this newspaper one of his reports on underground theater in present-day Iran, which—unlike years ago—is going through a “complex and contradictory” situation: “on the one hand, it emerges as a response to ideological and political censorship, but on the other, it risks being reduced to mere escapism.”
Despite everything, it persists—just like underground cinema, murals, and self-published and clandestine literature, which Azar Nafisi did not abandon during her years in Iran before going into exile in the United States. In her autobiographical work Reading Lolita in Tehran (Duomo, 2014), adapted to the big screen in 2024 by filmmaker Eran Riklis, she recounts how she managed to organize a secret reading club for seven female students in Tehran, where they discussed banned novels by authors such as Nabokov, Austen, and Fitzgerald.
Actress Golshifteh Farahani, who plays the protagonist, has been very active on social media lately, sharing poems that call for change, along with reflections of her own and those of other intellectuals. In one of them she says: “If you are Iranian, you are a prisoner of the Islamic Republic. It doesn’t matter whether you live inside or outside.”
The backdrop of Reading Lolita in Tehran recalls another novel: The Book of Fate, by bestselling author Parinoush Saniee, whose reissue has just reached bookstores this January. Its protagonist, Massoumeh, sees the plans she had before the Islamic Revolution shattered by the various transformations of a country increasingly cast into intolerance. This newspaper attempted to contact her for this report, but, as her Spanish publisher Alianza Editorial recalls, the author is currently in Iran, where, amid the protests, the Internet has been cut off for a week.
This fact worries those abroad. So much so that more than one artist apologized for not participating in the report—at least until they receive news from their loved ones—though they did not hesitate to suggest other contacts. That is how we reached calligrapher Pouran Jinchi, who believes art “is a form of resistance nourished by the soul of a nation. Artists stand at the forefront of progress and are often seen as forerunners of cultural, political, and economic change, capable of driving transformation.”
This can be seen in her works, whether indirectly, as in her case, or more overtly, as with Soheila Sokhanvari, whose pieces openly address the contemporary political landscape. For her drawings she uses crude oil—a material not typically associated with art—to remind us that “oil-rich countries like Iran always try to fight for democracy and freedom, but at the cost of human lives.”
Despite the terror, this artist finds inspiration in her compatriots, especially Generation Z, “who grew up with smartphones but without experiencing pre-revolutionary Iran. Even so, they are pushing boundaries by fighting for human rights and trying to express their identity by singing and dancing in public and removing the hijab.”
Some of these young women striving to find a future in an atmosphere of oppression have been portrayed since 1999 by Zanas (a pseudonym) in her series Iran Revisited. The artist and photographer refuses to romanticize Iranian culture within a Western narrative, both in her installations and her photographs, and strives to avoid clichés such as the veiled woman or the desert. “Art creates freedom and is a means to share our experiences, both viscerally and intellectually,” she recalls.
And that is precisely what Marjane Satrapi has been doing for years with iconic graphic novels such as Persepolis, which recounts the Iranian Islamic Revolution through the eyes of a child, or the recent collective volume Woman, Life, Freedom, commemorating the beginning of the veil revolution.
The same slogan, in English—Woman Life Freedom—was used by opera singer Cameron Shahbazi for his benefit concert in support of human rights in Iran, which earned him the 2023 Opus Klassik award in the Innovative Concert of the Year category. The countertenor, who debuted last season at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, explains that he travels the world “performing works from the Baroque to the modern era, including heroic characters from ancient Persia. But how could I sing their stories and not echo the voices of the true heroes: the Iranian people?”
For Shahbazi, “what is happening now is not just another protest; it is a revolution, a cry for life itself. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor, religious and secular, are bravely uniting across the country’s 31 provinces, facing the bullets of a weakened regime resorting to weapons of war, including machine guns, to massacre civilian crowds. For those of us in the diaspora, the distance hurts. We watch in anguish, trying to reach our loved ones through fragile and nearly nonexistent connections. We feel proud, heartbroken, hopeful, and burdened with guilt for not being there to march beside them—all at once. Even for those of us born abroad, the pain is inherited and lives in our bones.”
This is something filmmaker Jafar Panahi also feels. At the helm of A Simple Accident, a moral fable that settles scores with the regime, he recently told this newspaper after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes: “My wish is that people question whether we need to continue with violence or not.” He is now leading his path toward the Oscars, with the world closely watching Iran.
